Knorr Cetina is the Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor (Jointly Appointed in Anthropology) and chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.
A knowledge object is a theoretical concept introduced by Knorr Cetina to describe the emergence of post-social relations in epistemic cultures.
During this time, Knorr-Cetina engaged in her first empirical investigations of science leading the 1975 publication (with Hermann Strasser and Hans Georg Zilian) Determinants and Controls of Scientific Development.
The empirical research conducted while at Berkeley also became her widely cited 1981 publication The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science.
Knorr-Cetina's progression to understanding how technology mediates sociality led her to select global financial markets as a new "laboratory" to study knowledge in society.
[7] Knorr Cetina’s lecture “The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World” from 2008 is vital in rethinking past assumptions about communication and interaction order previously published by sociologists, namely Erving Goffman.
This idea can be seen as a result of the advancement in technology in recent years, and adds a new dimension to Goffman’s social situation where face-to-face interaction is required.